Becoming Noise: Unwanted Sounds From Helmholtz To Hegarty
Delivered at ISSTC 2012, the annual convocation of the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association (Cork, Ireland).
This paper presents over a dozen readings of noise, referencing Attali, Cage, Cascone, Derrida, Hegarty, Helmholtz, Kahn, Schafer, Schwarz, and Virilio. This surplus of definitions will be used as justification for reconsidering noise, not as a noun, but as verb. Noise is process, a “coming into being”, a generative axis without which no sound could exist.
August 2012
No Input Software: Cybernetics, Improvisation and the Machinic Phylum
Paper delivered at ISSTA 2011, the first convocation of the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association, Limerick, Ireland.
Feedback describes a circuit (electronic, social, biological or otherwise) in which the output or result influences the input or cause. This paper examines how cybernetics were applied to musical systems by Louis Barron, David Tudor, and Toshimaru Nakamura. The author presents the No Input Software Environment (NISE), an implementation of a “no source mixing desk” that tests our faith in the digital realm as a site of perfect representation and replication.
August 2011
Forgetting Interactivity: Notes Towards a Typology
Paper delivered at Interactivity and the Audio Arts, University of Kent, UK.
This paper develops a typology of interactivity, defined according to the roles played by various entities within the system. Along the way, the paper challenges the contemporary assumption of the necessity for a computer in the system, considers the problematic inherent in the oxymoron “virtual reality” and explores the mirror form in relationship to the interactive.
June 2010